Short entry today for two reasons. One, I know I’m going to repeat myself somewhat in what I have to say today. Two, I’m focusing right now on writing a longer essay for tomorrow commenting on the case of John Comaroff at Harvard and I want to get that just right. I’m very disappointed in the people writing letters that defended him without the signatories knowing the facts—it is a depressing and degrading repeat of what happened with the case of Avital Ronell—but I also want to think about a bigger terrain surrounding graduate training in general.
But on to masks for today’s commentary.
I’m doing my best to think about the pandemic in hindsight. Not to be “over it”, but to start processing what we’ve learned about early 21st Century humanity as a whole and what we’ve learned about the specifics of how people relate to one another in particular communities, regions, and nations. It’s not news to anyone reading this that the news in this respect is not good.
Like many of you reading, I have been at times infuriated, disgusted or despairing in the presence of people refusing to mask up in crowded interior spaces like supermarkets and flatly astonished by the aggression and rage of the anti-maskers in those same places. Very early in the pandemic, in May 2020, I went to a large supermarket with a mask and a man followed me out to the car and started screaming at me: why was I wearing that, it wasn’t any worse than a cold, why was I such a sheep? It was easily one of the most unsettling encounters with a stranger that I’ve ever had. I did not ever return the favor by demanding that someone mask up or put the mask over their nose, but I’ve felt the desire to at times. Mostly I just did my best to avoid situations where such people were present in numbers, at least until I had my second vaccination dose, and for a time, a lot of retail stores in this area also enforced policies that took the burden of enforcement off of us wearing masks.
On the flip side of things, I feel as if a lot of us who wore masks because we accepted evidence of their efficacy learned over time to comprehensively discount people who said that they found masks uncomfortable. “I scarcely know I have it on!”, “Don’t be such a baby, it’s no big deal!” and so on.
It has been pretty clear all along why hearts have been hardened on both sides of the masking divide, which is that the most destructive political leadership in modern American history made a conscious, programmatic choice to map masking and vaccination onto the deep political divisions that they were working to aggravate further. Commitment to masking or refusal to masking became the most powerful signifier of expansive sociopolitical commitments and identities. I do not pretend that we can simply unravel those easily, because the root-level commitments stem not only from real divisions in terms of self-interest but also genuine differences in our respective ideas about society and politics—many anti-maskers are in quite serious ways committed to a sectarian, racially motivated and anti-democratic view of American society and to the magnification of their own political power over the majority.
However, there is one small thing I think we could consider around the edges of this very real divide. The first is that for many of us, masking was not just about “following the science”. It was also about performing kindness or consideration for others. E.g., I continue to wear a mask in interior spaces now not primarily to protect myself, and perhaps not even to protect the unvaccinated, but because someone else might be more comfortable if I were masked. I’m aware that there are people who feel very uncomfortable or worried if there are a lot of unmasked people, so I’m perfectly happy to continue being mindful of those folks. It is not a major inconvenience to me to do so. There are obviously limits to this kind of etiquette, but masking is nowhere near those limits.
On the flip side, though, even though I don’t find a mask particularly uncomfortable over relatively short periods of time, I’m completely willing to credit that some people do. A lot of masking advocacy is aggressively contemptuous of the idea that anybody could possibly be genuinely uncomfortable with masks in any setting or at any length of time. Part of being an ethical citizen of a genuinely pluralistic and democratic society is that you have to take people seriously when they tell you they feel a particular way even if you think they’re exaggerating or inventing that feeling. Cancelling out what people say they feel to assert that they really feel something else (or should feel differently) isn’t something to do casually or without some evidence justifying that cancellation. So the consideration I owe people who will be uncomfortable in an unmasked space has some complicated relationship to a consideration I should have for people who will be uncomfortable masking.
In an ideal world, the people who really do find it hard to wear a mask for any length of time (let’s leave out the plainly bogus invocations of religious commitment or even disability as justification, which aren’t necessary: if you feel that way, you feel that way) might have been able to feel enough kindness and consideration for others (for protecting the unvaccinated, for making the people with pre-existing conditions feel safe) to endure something they find unpleasant. And the people who had no qualms about masking might feel enough empathy for people who really hate the physical sensation of it or the loss of the ability to read faces to understand that it’s a real trial for some folks to have to do it. That this ideal world is so far from the world we actually live in is a further indictment of our actual state of mind: for one group of people, kindness towards others has become politically unthinkable, and in return, that has made it impossible for the rest of us to credit the content of what those who see disregard for others as a virtue might otherwise say about their own feelings.
Image credit: Photo by Brian Asare on Unsplash
Thanks for this. It certainly is possible that some people are profoundly uncomfortable with their masks, yet they seem to map sociologically in a particular way. As you know, the “sheep” discourse comes from somewhere in particular. I am both dreading and awaiting your post for tomorrow.